量子力学英文课件格里菲斯Chapter3.pptVIP

Outline In the last two chapters, we have stumbled on a number of interesting properties of simple quantum systems. Some of these are “accidental” features of specific potentials (the even spacing of energy levels for the harmonic oscillator, for example), but others seem to be more general, and it would be nice to prove them once and for all (the uncertainty principle, for instance, and the orthogonality of stationary states). The purpose of this chapter is to recast the theory in a more powerful form, with that in mind. There is not much here that is genuinely new; the idea, rather, is to make coherent sense of what we have already discovered in particular cases. The state of a system is represented by its wave function, observables are represented by operators. Quantum theory is based on two constructs: wave functions and operators. Mathematically, wave functions satisfy the defining conditions for abstract vectors, and operators act on them as linear transformations. So the natural language of quantum mechanics is linear algebra. In an N-dimensional space, it is simplest to represent a vector, |??, by the N-tuple of its components, {an}, with respect to a specified orthonormal basis: The inner product, ?? | ? ?, of two vectors (generalizing the dot product in three dimensions) is the complex number, Linear transformations, T, are represented by matrices (with respect to the specified basis), which act on vectors (to produce new vectors) by the ordinary rules of matrix multiplication: For them the N-tuple/matrix notation is awkward(使人尴尬的), at best, and manipulations(处理) that are well-behaved in the finite-dimensional case can be problematic(成问题的).So even though most of the terminology and notation should be familiar, it pays to approach this subject with caution. But the vectors we encounter in quantum mechanics are (for the most part) functions, and they live in infinite - dimensional spaces. To represent a possible physical state, the wave fun